ABSTRACT
As performed by the Moscow Art Theatre, Anton Chekhov's plays encourage us to revise our ordinary scale of dramatic and theatrical values. They suggest a new answer to that old question: What is dramatic? They hint that each dramatist, each new playwright, must answer this question anew - that ‘drama’ is not mere repetition of the old threadbare, theatrical situations and climaxes, but is perhaps rather some universal quality in life which in some unique and illuminating fashion must be distilled and intensified by each new artist. Much has been written of Chekhov's ‘realism’, of his fidelity in reproducing middle-class society in Russia before the revolution of 1905. Now, it is absurd to consider Chekhov a realist in the narrow sense. Primarily he did not aim to reproduce Russian life. His art was not the photographic representation of life; rather it was first, last, and always the creation of drama; and drama, in its sharpest, solidest, most rounded form, he discovered in the common stuff of the world and the life about him. He was a realist only in the sense that every true artist is a realist - since he sought to crystallize and to give form to the inner spiritual realities of life. He never aimed at mere superficial or external representation.
